Trump unveils tariffs on steel, aluminum as Russia warns on US relations: Live

After freezing nearly all foreign aid in late January, the Trump administration has been attempting to fire thousands of employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development in hopes of dismantling the organization entirely.

Elon Musk, the billionaire and newly appointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has repeatedly attacked USAID, which handles projects across 141 countries worldwide, saying it is “time for it to die.” The agency’s future remains unclear as a judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s bid to put 2,200 USAID workers on administrative leave, though the funding freeze remains in place.

Despite Trump’s swift crackdown on foreign aid, the American people do not approve of the freeze on USAID, The Independent can exclusively reveal, according to a poll of 1,946 Americans by Prolific.

Alicja Hagopian has the details.

Donald Trump has ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard, claiming the groups have been “infiltrated” by “woke leftist idealogues.”

The boards for each branch of the services oversee morale and discipline, the curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, financial matters, academic methods, and other school-related matters.

The president wrote on Truth Social:

Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years. I have ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard. We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!

Each board is comprised of six members appointed by the president, three appointed by the vice president, four appointed by the House speaker, one designated by the Senate Armed Services Committee, and one designated by the House Armed Services Committee.

In recent years, who gets to be in these independent advisory groups has become somewhat political. When he took office, President Joe Biden removed all of Trump’s appointees, questioning their qualifications.

Included were adviser Kellyanne Conway who was named to the Air Force board, and former press secretary Sean Spice, a Navy Reserve officer who was on the Naval Academy board.

The newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reports that Brazil’s government plans to tax U.S. tech companies if President Donald Trump introduces a 25% tariff on all steel imports into the United States.

Brazil is one of the largest sources of U.S. steel imports and a key market for many major tech companies.

According to the report, which cites an unnamed Brazilian authority, companies facing potential Brazilian levies include Amazon, Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet-owned Google.

Brazil’s Finance Minister, Fernando Haddad, stated that the government would only comment on the issue once Trump’s measures are officially announced.

“The government has decided to comment only on concrete decisions, not announcements that could be misinterpreted or revised,” he told reporters. “The government will wait for an official decision before making any statement.”

A finance ministry official in 2024 had already proposed a possible tax on large tech companies to meet fiscal targets in case there was a shortfall in government revenue this year.

A federal judge in Boston will today consider whether to block President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk from implementing their unprecedented plan to buy out tens of thousands of federal employees.

Three federal employee unions—backed by 20 Democratic attorneys general—argue that the Office of Personnel Management’s deferred resignation offer is an “unlawful ultimatum” that coerces government workers to resign under the “threat of mass termination.”

“OPM’s Fork Directive is a sweeping and stunningly arbitrary action to solicit blanket resignations of federal workers,” wrote lawyers for the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the National Association of Government Employees. “Defendants have not even argued — nor could they — that the Fork Directive was the product of rational or considered decision-making.”

The buyout offer, part of Trump’s initiative to reduce the size of government through Musk’s newly established Department of Government Efficiency, was sent with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” the same phrase Musk used when he cut jobs at Twitter after acquiring the company in 2022.

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. last week temporarily blocked the offer until today to consider issuing a temporary restraining offer pausing the order.

Stay tuned for the latest as it happens…

Russ Vought, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was sued twice last night by the union representing CFPB employees.

This morning Vought has apparently told employees to “stand down” from the agency.

Another federal judge has slapped down Donald Trump’s executive order to unilaterally redefine the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause.

New Hampshire District Judge Joseph Normand Laplante will release a written order later today.

This was one of the first lawsuits, filed by an immigrants’ rights advocacy group with support from the ACLU.

The order marks the third federal judge to block the order.

Russia is standing firm on its conditions for peace in Ukraine and has neither confirmed nor denied whether President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump have spoken, as the U.S. leader claimed on Sunday.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov painted a bleak picture when speaking to the media on Monday, stating that relations with Washington “are balancing on the brink of a breakup.”

He reiterated that the war in Ukraine would continue until Kyiv abandons its plans to join NATO and withdraws from the four regions occupied by Russian forces.

In remarks suggesting Moscow is maintaining its tough negotiating stance, Ryabkov said that “we simply imperatively need to get … the new U.S. administration to understand and acknowledge that without resolving the problems that are the root causes of the crisis in Ukraine, it will not be possible to reach an agreement.”

The “political solution as we envisage it cannot be achieved otherwise than through the full implementation of what was pronounced by President Putin when he spoke to the Russian Foreign Ministry in June,” Ryabkov said.

“This is where we are and the sooner U.S., Britain, and others understand it, the better it would be and the closer this desired political solution will be for everyone,” said Ryabkov.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that he would “neither confirm nor deny” Trump’s comments to reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, indicating that he and Putin had spoken in his first officially acknowledged contact with the Russian leader since 2022.

Asked whether he had had a conversation with Putin since he became president on January 20 or before, Trump told reporters: “I’ve had it. Let’s just say I’ve had it.”

With reporting from Reuters

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his fellow Democrats have set up a whistleblower complaint portal for federal workers wishing to report what they believe to be unlawful activities at their agencies as Elon Musk and his DOGE underlings attempt to downsize the federal government.

That portal is right here, for those that need it.